NewsWrap
for the week ending November 1, 2003
(As broadcast on This Way Out program #814, distributed 11-3-03)
[Written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Graham Underhill, Fenceberry, Rex
Wockner, and Greg Gordon]
Anchored by Jon Beaupré and Cindy Friedman
In what's believed to be the first pride parade in the Chinese world,
perhaps 1,000 Taiwanese lesbigays and their allies marched through Taipei this
week. More than 50 units followed a 20-meter-long rainbow flag from a park widely
associated with gays to the city's commercial center. As Mayor Ma Ying-jeou
noted in addressing the rally, the city has contributed funds to the annual
Taipei Gay Carnival since its 1999 inception.
He said, "We do this because there are 290,000 homosexuals in Taipei and we
want them to be treated equally like heterosexuals. I want to tell our
homosexual friends -- if you live in Taipei, you won't be discriminated against."
March organizers the Taiwan Tongzhi Hotline called their event the Lesbian
and Gay Civil Rights Movement, and they want sexual orientation discrimination
to be prohibited by law.
At least one organizer is somewhat skeptical of the fate of the Taiwan
Government's proposed legal recognition of same-gender couples. A Cabinet
spokesperson reaffirmed this week that a draft is underway and should be ready for
Parliamentary review in December, as part of the Basic Human Rights Bill. To
date, no country in Asia has recognized gay and lesbian couples.
Pride issues are a little different in the English-speaking nations -- it
comes down to money.
Auckland's venerable HERO Festival organizers happily announced this week
that they've cleared the debt of 140,000 New Zealand dollars that's handcuffed
the festival's charitable trust for two years. Creditors have all agreed to
accept partial payment and many actually donated that payment back to HERO. That
frees organizers legally to get to work on the festival for this coming
February.
Vancouver Pride Society leaders told their annual general meeting last week
that about three-fourths of the debt of 106,000 Canadian dollars they began
the year with has been paid off, and that money owed to the group will cover
the rest once it's received, the magazine "Xtra West" has reported. Internal
accounting had been such a mess that the Society board had asked authorities to
examine the group's 2002 finances. Police found insufficient evidence to
pursue an investigation, while a British Columbia provincial agency continues its
audit.
But while those groups have struggled out of their financial quagmires, Lo
ndon's Mardi Gras shareholders decided at their general meeting to go into
voluntary liquidation, Rainbow Network reported. This group had staged London's
Pride festival since their predecessors went under in 1999. Without grants,
the gap between production costs and income from tickets grew bigger each year,
and this year attendance was hampered by bad weather.
It wasn't money but a legal issue that nixed Australia's 2004 National
Lesbian Festival and Conference, planned for January in Daylesford. The event won
some national attention when a trial court greenlighted organizers' plan to
restrict attendance to what they called "Lesbians Born Female" -- that is, to
exclude transwomen -- with an exemption from Victoria's state equal opportunity
laws. But after transwomen of the group Australian WOMAN Network, offended
by the term "female-born," won a reversal on appeal, organizers called off the
event for the coming year... while vowing to try again.
In Australia's national Senate this week, the Coalition Government's
massive pension reform bill was finally approved, but without recognition of gay and
lesbian partners. For the first time, the Australian Labor Party joined in
support of recognizing same-gender couples with the Greens and the Australian
Democrats, after the Democrats resolved an internal division on the issue. But
four independent Senators opposed their amendments to swing the vote the
Government's way. Labor is only willing to go so far, though; its legal affairs
spokesperson Robert McLelland told a gathering of the party's lesbigay group
Rainbow Labor that it might consider a partnership registry but not legal
marriage for same-gender couples.
Also this week, a Defence Department spokesperson reaffirmed that
newly-expanded benefits for partners of members of the Australian Defence Force are not
available to the same-gender partners of gay and lesbian servicemembers.
While this was said to be in line with the way the Government defines "de facto"
and "married" couples, the Government could include same-gender couples if it
wished -- and indeed was encouraged to do so by the Human Rights Commission
early this year.
Britain's Government this week introduced its move to add sexual
orientation as a category protected under the nation's hate crimes law. The amendment
to the Criminal Justice Bill would also add disability to the current
categories of race and religion, whose use in targeting victims can lead to harsher
sentences for perpetrators.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has released its annual hate
crimes report, including more than 1,200 homophobic incidents involving more than
1,500 victims. Reporting of hate crimes from local agencies to the FBI remains
spotty, with only 15% of participating local agencies reporting any hate
crimes whatsoever in 2002. Significantly more anti-gay cases are identified by
the non-profit National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, from victim and
news reports in just some parts of the country. This led to renewed calls for
the addition of sexual orientation as a category protected under federal hate
crimes laws, and not just the Hate Crimes Statistics Act signed by the first
President Bush 12 years ago. But even with the chronic undercounting, the FBI
still pegged anti-gay attacks at their highest percentage yet of all reported
hate crimes, 16.7%, third behind racial and religious attacks.
The city of Casper, Wyoming is doing what it can to stop the latest
campaign by peripatetic professional homophobe Fred "Godhatesfags" Phelps. October
marked the 5th anniversary of the death of University of Wyoming student
Matthew Shepard, the world's most famous gay-bashing victim. Phelps and his Topeka,
Kansas Westboro Baptist Church -- whose members are mostly his family --
declared their intention to erect a $15,000 6-foot granite memorial to Shepard in
a city park in Casper, his hometown. Its engraved plaque with a portrait of
Shepard would read, "Matthew Shepard entered hell October 12, 1998 at age 21 in
defiance of God's warning: 'Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with
womankind; it is abomination.' --Leviticus 18:22." In fact Phelps declared he would
"pockmark" the nation with identical monuments, having seized on a federal
appeals court decision that if a city displays the Ten Commandments on public
property, it must allow other religious displays. Casper has a Ten Commandments
monument, a gift from the Fraternal Order of Eagles.
This week the Casper City Council held a special meeting to respond to
Phelps. The Council unanimously rejected his monument plan, as did all of the
citizens who offered a total of four hours of testimony and another 50 who
demonstrated outside. Then, while 4 Councilmembers voted to remove the Ten
Commandments display from public land, a majority of 5 voted to move it to a new plaza
designated as an historical monument to the development of American law. A
similar plaza in Colorado withstood a legal challenge to its inclusion of the
Ten Commandments. Casper's move may or may not sidestep a legal battle with
the tireless litigators among the Phelps clan, but either way it probably won't
stop the monument. Phelps has said that if he can't put it in the city park,
he'll buy private property in Casper for it.
Meanwhile, he's already aiming at his second target, the town of Rupert,
Idaho, where he's asking to buy a piece of the courthouse lawn for his monument.
An American Legion chapter there has already been trying to buy a place on
that lawn for a Ten Commandments display, but it's not yet clear if they can do
so. At this point it's uncertain even whether it's the city of Rupert or
Minidoka County that actually owns the lawn.
The Arizona state Supreme Court this week rejected a challenge to a
gubernatorial order prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination and harassment in
state employment. Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano's June order applies
only to the executive branch of state government. In July, a half-dozen
Republican state legislators with the help of the religious right legal group All
iance Defense Fund directly petitioned the state's highest court to block it.
They argued that only the state legislature could set civil rights standards, and
pointed to its 2001 rejection of much broader protections for gays and
lesbians. The justices did not comment in declining to take the case, so it's not
clear how they might ultimately decide if the plaintiffs take it to trial court.
And finally... a U.K. reality TV show has run into reality of another kind.
Viewers won't be seeing "There's Something About Miriam," a new show from
"Big Brother" and "Fear Factor" producers Endemol, that had been planned to air
in November on SkyOne. The apparently ordinary set-up was that a half-dozen
male contestants would vie for the affections of "Miriam," described by the
producers' spokesperson as "a gorgeous creature." And woo they did, some going
so far as kisses in their quest for a 10,000-pound prize. But this week all
six men lawyered up to stop the broadcast and any mention of their names,
claiming breach of contract, personal injury, defamation, and conspiracy to commit a
sexual assault. They'd responded to recruiting ads for "the adventure of a
lifetime" as men who "want it all" and are "fit and up for everything." But
they'd signed releases only before confronting the show's surprise twist -- that
Miriam is a pre-op transsexual. Producers insist they took care never to
refer to Miriam as female, but in the face of the threatened lawsuit the show's
been shelved. It now seems ironic that the project's working title was "Find
Me A Man".